The Machine Stops

E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops is a weird little short story; it's a dystopia, but not as we know it, and written in a strangely disjunct style, though whether deliberately or not, I don't know.

In Forster's underground society, everyone is white as a sheet due to their lack of exposure to the sun, and everyone lives in separate little pods, services supplied to them via a huge central computer called the Machine. People worship the Machine and its Book, which tells them which switch links to which service (so, you press a button and get some food, press another and a bed pops out from the wall, etc). People watch and give lectures to pass the time using an interactive TV set, and barely ever leave their pods. The story centres around a rebel called Kuno who finds his way out onto the ruined, scorching Earth, only to get sucked back in by the Machine's guards ("the Mending Apparatus"). Most of the time, we follow his mother, a devotee to the Machine who will not take her son's rebellion seriously. At the end of the short story, everyone dies when the Machine breaks down and everything technological comes to a halt. Cheery.

Most of the ideas in The Machine Stops have been covered by other books, but it's a useful back-up text to discuss. There are 'cinematophotes', which are like interactive television sets, comparable to ours in the modern day, and a central computer which could be seen as Google HQ, although Google doesn't really provide for all our physical needs like the Machine does, and it couldn't really help us live underground in the same way as the Machine (other than by providing a WikiHow page on it, maybe.) In other words, there are comparisons, but I can't labour the point too much because Forster's world is quite detached from ours in its fundamentals, what with people white-faced and isolated under the Earth and all.

Perhaps my main comparator with today will be the furore at the end of the book when the Machine crashes; imagine all of the services that are provided by forms of technology suddenly stopping for us. No TV or computers, no light, no water, no forms of long-distance communication. It would be a bit extreme to say we'd all die within a few minutes, but we'd certainly suffer in ways we wouldn't have a century ago.